Imagined Communities

THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS In every instance, the ‘choice’ of language appears as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development. As such, it was utterly different from the selfconsicious language policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with the rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms. One clear sign of the difference is that the old administrative languages were just that:languages used by and for officialdoms for their own inner convenience. There was no idea of systematically imposing the language on the dynasts’ various subject populations. Nonetheless, the elevation of these vernaculars to the status of languages-of-power, where, in one sense, they were competitors with Latin (French in Paris, [Early] English in London), made its own contribution to the decline of the imagined community of Christendom. THE LAST WAVE It is instructive that as late as 1848, almost two generations after the Swiss state came into being, ancient religious cleavages were much more politically salient than linguistic ones. Remarkably enough, in territories unalterably-denoted Catholic Protestantism was unlawful, and in those so-denoted Protestant Catholicism was illegal; and these laws were strictly enforced. (Language was a matter of personal choice and convenience). Only after 1848, in the backwash of Europe-wide revolutionary upheavals and the general spread of vernacularizing national movements, did language take religion’s place, and the country become segmented into unalterably-denoted linguistic zones. (Religion now became a matter of personal choice). MEMORY AND FORGETTING Here and elsewhere Michelet made it clear that those whom he was exhuming were by no means a random assemblage of forgotten, anonymous dead. They were those whose sacrifices, throughout History, made possible the rupture of 1789 and the selfconscious appearance of the French nation, even when there sacrifices were not understood as such by the victims. Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity – product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century – engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity… … Nations, however have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural. Because there is no Originator, the nation’s biography can not be written evangelically, ‘down time,’ through a long procreative chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it ‘up time’ – towards Peking Man, Java Man, King Arthur, where the lamp of archaeology casts its fitful gleam.